Getting it Right

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

--"Lake Isle of Innisfree", William Butler Yeats

I know many people who believe that their problems and inadequacies as adults are derived from problems and bad experiences in their childhood.

I am not one of those people. 

I had an exceptional childhood filled with love, laughter, and adventure. I grew up in a small town in Southern USA in the 80s with sweet tea and popsicles on our front steps, complete with long summers with plastic pools and slip-n-slides. We had no Internet, laptops, or DVDs, and we got bored, gloriously bored. I had two parents who loved each other and my brother and me unconditionally and provided a stable home  that we yearned to return to at the end of a school day. Our home smelled clean and looked cleaner, and my mother would have a homemade snack and a list of questions about our day waiting for us upon arrival. We ate dinner together as a family every night, and we watched our favorite tv shows together once or twice a week as a treat. I remember catching fireflies at dusk on long summer evenings while my parents sat watching and talking with neighbors sitting in metal lawn chairs. We had magical Christmases with too many presents, delicious food, and family. We made piles of leaves in Autumn and jumped in them, making the leaves fly and watching them make their twists and turns in the air during their descent. We took beach vacations and went on camping trips and told stories which made us laugh many years later. In fact, I cannot think of one thing I would change about my childhood.

With such a childhood, I dreamed of providing my own children with similar experiences, and so far, quite honestly it's been a hard act to follow. I've experienced more "parenting fails" then I'd like to admit, and my children are growing up in an environment that could not be more different than the one from my childhood. Yes, my husband and I love each other and our children more than life itself, but we might as well be from two different planets. We are from different countries, cultures, faiths, and speak two different languages. My children grapple with speaking two different languages at home while trying to learn a third at school just to communicate with the other kids on the playground. Bucker, my oldest, traveled half way around the world to Palestine with Raed before his second bithday. Since then, the boys have accumulated more stamps in their passports in their 2 and 4 years than I had the first 25 years of my life. We moved our children away from everything they knew to Berlin, and live in the middle of a city, in an apartment half the size of our previous home in the States. Personally, I've screamed at my children, completely lost it and cried in public as a result of their behavior (more than once), and have spent far too long on the phone/Internet and watching TV when I should have been on the floor playing with my boys. All of these things my mother, pillar of strength and wisdom driving her Custom Cruiser station wagon (back in the 80s), would never have dreamed of doing. Further, I've shamelessly bribed them on countless occasions and fed them entirely too much sugar. So, all in all, to say we haven't provided the stablest of homes for the boys would be quite the understatement. 

But last week, we got it right.

We went on vacation. My husband and I chose a small rental home in Sardinia, Italy, where we could enjoy the beach for a week. We packed one suitcase, yes one, and took a quick two hour flight on a discount airline. This wasn't any ordinary trip for us. There was no telephone, no television, no Internet, and the house was in a sparsely populated area, so we pretty much had the area and beach to ourselves. Largely untraveled dirt roads led to white sand beaches with sparkling, clear water. It was breathtakingly beautiful, rugged and unspoiled nature. Olive, orange, and lemon trees grew wild, and the air was scented with honeysuckle and salt.

Where we stayed

Running to and from the cold water

 The boys played for hours in the sand, and ran back and forth from the water, which was still far too cold to be comfortable in, squealing to the top of their lungs. We slept easily at night without the lure of the Internet and TV. We ate outside and lingered at the table over ice cream and coffee. We ate cold pizza on the beach for lunch, buried each other in the sand, and spent lazy afternoons in the sun. We dried our clothes on a line outside and cooked freshly caught fish over an open flame in the stone barbecue pit. The boys played imaginary games and my husband and I had time for an actual conversation or two. We built a fire in the fireplace and had afternoon tea and told stories on a rainy afternoon. In short, we gave our children time, time with each other and with ourselves in which we weren't pacifying them so we could be busy doing something else. We caught up as a family, and we saw how present we could be without all of the distractions of modern life. 

During the week we spent there, I thought about how my time is spent on a daily basis, and I realized how distracted I truly am. I came to realize that the majority of the struggles and problems in my life stem from things that distract me from living for "now" and being wholly present in whatever I am doing. Most of the time, I am either planning what to do next or thinking about how I could have done something differently in the past. I realize that life isn't a vacation in Sardinia, but I do hope to have brought home a new understanding of myself and what I need to change to live more fully, gulping in the air of life as it streams by. I hope that we gave ourselves and our children a taste of simplicity, and of quiet, and perhaps it will be one of those vacations that we can talk and laugh about for years to come. I think that this once, we got it right.

*****

Feel free to comment! Tell me about a time when you felt you "got it right". What distracts you from being fully present?

The Long Road Home: Adventures in Urban Living

Today, it takes us 45 minutes to walk the half mile that it takes to get from the boys' kita to home. I have my 2 year old, Zak, holding the handle on one side of the stroller who insists on walking ever so s.l.o.w.l.y beside it, and my able-bodied 4 year old, Bucker, perched in the front of the stroller, legs haphazardly dangling over the tray that's supposed to secure a small baby. Across the back of the stroller is an umbrella stroller, a feeble attempt that morning to encourage Bucker to walk to school rather than adding 50 pounds of weight to an already loaded stroller and getting lots of awkward stares. And just to be clear, my Joovy sit and stand stroller has become my car, my grocery cart, and my mover of all things too heavy to lug through the streets, so I had taken it to the grocery and loaded up on the way to retrieve the boys from kita, which is how I ended up with both the umbrella stroller and the prized double stroller that day.

Underneath the stroller is my loot from the grocery store, including 4 liters of milk, which we always manage to run out of since a liter size is the only size offered, 2 bottles laundry detergent, something that resembles dishwasher tabs that I'm hoping I guessed right on, and enough produce, bread, canned goods and veggies to last at least two days. And that's not all. On the back of the stroller is a package of diapers labeled XXL (a.k.a have you really not potty trained your child yet??) that I picked up from the DM, the local drugstore that I've grown quite fond of, and on my giant hook on the stroller handle, I've shamelessly hooked a 12 pack of "Ja" brand eco-friendly toilet paper. We love the "Ja" brand, as it's usually always the cheapest, and that comes in handy when you run through toilet paper, laundry detergent, and other such commodities as fast as we do. We're also quite embarrassed that it took us several months to discover that the brand is pronounced "Ya" rather than "Jaaa" (with a slight Southern twang on the "aa").

But I digress. During the half mile separating us from home, Bucker pushes Zak for a bit in the umbrella stroller until he fails to pop the front wheels up to get onto the curb and poor Zak is propelled forward onto the pavement. After the screaming subsides from that unfortunate incident, Zak decides he should push Bucker in the umbrella stroller, in which Bucker exceeds the weight limit by about 20 pounds. Unfortunately, Zak hasn't figured out that when pushing the stroller, you must look in the direction you are pushing rather than at your feet, so he crashes Bucker into a flower bed/tree, which is notoriously scattered with dog waste in our neighborhood. We then pass by the bakery where once a week, usually on Fridays, we stop in and the boys are allowed one item, be it a pastry or a coveted "chocolate egg" with a small toy inside. Much to Zak's dismay, today is not bakery day, and he finds it appropriate to sit on the sidewalk in front of the bakery's patrons trying to enjoy a quiet coffee al fresco and scream, "I want a cwoklate eggggg!" After attempting to reason with him and trying my best to avoid eye contact with the coffee sippers, I pick up Zak, screaming and stiff, and haul him under one arm, the loaded stroller with the other, and a snickering Bucker in tow.

Now Zak is a mostly good, kind-hearted child, but he is two, and lately he's having a very hard time accepting the word "no", so he proceeds to scream about the chocolate egg the entire journey home, his screams echoing between the old apartment buildings that line the cobblestone streets. And then I make another mistake; distracted by Zak's tantrum, I forget to cross the street to avoid the cute bookstore that always has a tempting display of children's books and small toys outside. Bucker is incapable of walking past the store without stopping to look, despite my coach-like chanting "keep walking", "keep walking", so there's typically a scene here since he'll find something he wants and attempts to walk off with it, which inevitably leads to the store manager coming outside and giving us nasty looks (you'd think she would know us by now). Today is no exception, and the cute plush bear sticking his head out of a box was just too tempting to pass up, as Bucker clutches it and attempts to take it home. After prying the bear away from Bucker under the ever-suspicious eye of the store manager, we continue our journey.

At this point, we're a mere two blocks from our doorstep when Bucker spies the park that we pass on our way, fondly referred to by the boys as "the jumping things" park due to it's mini trampolines that they love. Before I can find an appropriate threat to keep them walking toward home, Bucker is off and running toward the trampolines, Zak forgets to continue screaming about the chocolate egg and runs after him, and I'm left standing with the loaded stroller while the groceries inside slowly get warmer in the sun. After conceding to let them play for 5 minutes, I manage to round them up with a bit of bribery, and we make it to the door of our building. Smooth sailing from here on out, right? Think again...

There's a door opener buzzer that you can push beside the building's door that automatically buzzes the door open during normal business hours, and for awhile, I had taught Bucker to push the button and open the door for me. This worked beautifully until Zak realized that he was missing out on pushing the button, so now there's a mad dash to the door buzzer, and a fight over pushing the button before I can manage to referee them, which leads to one of the boys jerking the door open (usually Bucker), and inevitably Zak walks into the tile floored, high ceiling area which is closed off by another set of doors before you reach the elevator and lets out an ear-piercing squeal, which the excellent acoustic qualities of the room magnify to temporarily deafen me and anyone unlucky enough to be passing through with us. There are two more buttons to battle over in the elevator, and then, yes then, we reach our door step.

I open the door and feel the cool Spring breeze flowing through our humble apartment, kick my shoes off and feel the cool tile floor beneath my tired feet, and for a peaceful second, I remind myself how lucky I am that I have the opportunity to experience this life in this place with my two healthy, beloved children, spirited as they may be. As different as my life is now from what it was, I know this is a good place for our family, and we're making our way, one 45 minute walk home at a time.

And then there's a scream over a toy not shared, dinner that needs cooking, and warm groceries waiting....

*******

Do you have any stories to share about a simple task that turns out to be "not so simple"?